Recent reviews by Hooter

great sequel and a great Warhammer game

Out of all three Owlcat games, this is probably the weakest, but it is still a great CRPG. If you like Warhammer this should be an insta buy.

one of the best imsims I've played in the past years with a superb artstyle, highly reccomended

annoying on occasions, but a great game nonetheless

Sometimes really fun, mostly annoying.

There is fun to be had with Starfield - faction questlines are great (especially Vanguard), some places look really nice, there is surprisingly a lot of cool lore around, you can solve missions in multiple ways (better than FO4, worse than FO3, but I'll take anything from modern Bethesda).

However all of that is plagued with constant annoyances. You need to travel between places? Loading screens everywhere, don't forget you can't sprint for a long time so you will have to constantly slow down to re-charge your oxygen. Inventory system is awful. Crafting materials weight a ton - you are supposed to store them in the ship and outposts, but the storage space runs out very quickly and you have to travel back to your outpost (usually overencumbered), which is the antithesis of fun. Speaking of outposts, the whole system is very under-cooked and buggy. You can't snap elements to walls, you have to manually rotate stuff until it is almost good enough to not piss you off standing crooked. I've had research and crafting stations bug out on me multiple times. There is a limit on how many mannequins you can place (in a Bethesda game? really??), which you need to override with a console command if you want to have a nice storage room.
Other constant annoyances include not being able to skip certain animations (such as getting out of your chair in the cockpit, that you accidentally started because you long pressed the button that is also responsible for talking to other ships, so now you have to watch your character get out of the chair and then watch the animation of getting into the chair before you can respond to the hail of other ship). There are also quest markers that are buggy, especially in New Atlantis and are showing you the wrong district that you need to travel to, just so you can see the marker on a train that you actually need to take to a different place instead of travelling there in the first place.

Now let's talk companions. There are multiple followers, but only four fully fleshed out companions and they are not very fun to travel around with. They have good questlines, but beside those they are awfully one-dimensional with very annoying one-liner remarks and even if you do their questlines and make them grow as characters, the random dialogue snaps you out of this illusion of growth because it stays the same. I honestly think FO4 followers had more depth to them (though their quests were worse).
And now, for the finish, my biggest peeve with the game. Everything pales down when you see Akila City for the first time. You are telling me that capital of the second biggest human faction in XXIV century is a bunch of wooden and stone shacks, without proper roads, so people wallow in mud while also wearing cowboy costumes? This may seem small but tells you everything you need to understand about Starfield. They had a frontier faction centred around more freedom and less rules... so they made them cowboys... because reasons? Because that's easiest they can come up with? I get giving them a small amount of that wild west vibe, but honestly when you take a step back, you realise there is a lot of things that are this lazy and completely unbelievable.

TLDR 30% really good 70% annoying

I mean, what's there even to add at this point.

Changed from negative to positive after one year of patches - the game is no longer in beta and it is actually very good now.

If you liked Gothic or Gothic-likes you will like this too.

Some reviews are complaining about the game being too short for the price - and while I do agree that it is short (it took me about 8 hours to 100% it), the experience is definitely worth the asking price and I highly recommend it.

Probably the best city builder that I've played in the last 10 years or so. Even in Early Access has more content than most other city builders on the market. Highly recommended.

EDIT: Updating after a year - this game is even better. Devs post a major update every two weeks.